Tag Archive: perpetual comeback

Pulado has an option on the Gameplay Tab that when checked causes the player’s rate of fire to increase the lower their hitpoints get. So as the player takes more damage they start shooting faster and faster. This gives the player a sense of urgency and makes them feel more powerful even though they may be losing. The feature was inspired by a post on game design by Sir Lin (found here: http://www.sirlin.net/articles/slippery-slope-and-perpetual-comeback.html ).

SirLin wrote:

Perpetual Comeback

The opposite of slippery slope, I call perpetual comeback. That’s just a more descriptive term for negative feedback. (Also, negative feedback sounds like a bad thing, but it’s usually a good quality in games, so it’s helpful to have a term that doesn’t sound negative.) A thermostat uses negative feedback to keep the temperature of a room from spiraling out of control.

Perpetual comeback, then, is a quality in which being behind actually gives you an advantage. I’d like to draw a distinction between two types of this effect, though. In one, when you are behind, a force pushes on you to help improve your position. An example of this is the Fatboy mutator in Unreal Tournament. In that first-person shooter mod, when you kill an enemy, you become fatter and easier to hit. When you die, you become skinnier and harder to hit. Multiple hits magnify the effect, so if you die over and over you get skinner and skinner. Note that even if you die a lot, you are still losing (your score is not helped), but you do have an advantage (harder to hit).